Genealogy (from Greek: γενεά, genea, "generation"; and λόγος, logos, "knowledge") is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral traditions, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members. The results are often displayed in charts or written as narratives.

Family Trees – Back to the Roots

Discovering the origin of your family is an exciting and educational endeavor. You’ll learn about the customs and traditions from which your family tree sprang, and you’ll be able to add some of those practices into your own lives. How can you go about investigating the history of your family?

The first step is to start speaking with the current living members of your family. Ask them as many questions as possible about their, and other family members’, birth dates, country, state and/or town of origin, place where most of their life was spent, any children or spouses that they might have had and so forth. If you are asking about deceased members of the family, find out their date of death as well. As the investigation progresses, you may need to find some birth or death certificates.

After compiling as much information as possible from the living members of your family, you can bring that information to an investigator or another professional who specializes in genealogy. Through using the information that you are presenting, as well as providing details about yourself, this individual can work on tracing your family tree even farther back into history.

Of course, you could do some of this work yourself on a website such as Ancestry.com. The type of source you use is really a matter of personal preference. For example, some individuals want to keep their project a secret and a surprise for other family members, so they might be more comfortable turning to the web for answers. Other individuals are not excellent at web research, and they might feel that the details are more pertinent and real if they speak with an actual individual. In any case, it’s likely that you will have to pay some sort of fee to go far back into history.

Once you’ve found all of the information that you want, what are you to do with it? Well, perhaps you’ve been searching for a project that your child is doing at school, and he or she might have to draw an actual tree with branches to represent the different members of the family. After the project has been submitted and returned, you could hang this up in your house. Other options include creating a family tree for the home, or using the discovered information to enhance the religious and cultural practices of your family unit.